Lyst at EuroPython 2015

Our engineering team is taking a short hop to mainland Europe this July to attend
EuroPython 2015 in sunny Bilbao, Spain. We’ll be spending six days with fellow Pythonistas from all across Europe (and even the world!) and attending over 200 sessions, workshops, and social events.

The team at Lyst have been eager to share some of the knowledge we’ve picked up over the past year. We’re lucky enough to be doing three different presentations over the course of the event. This is the first time we’ve had more than one speaker at a conference and we’d love it if you popped along to chat with us.

I’ve taken the time to have a chat with our engineers about their talks, so let me quickly introduce you to them:

Romain Guillbert

Romain works on the PyPy project, a popular alternative runtime engine for Python, written in Python! At Lyst, Romain works on the Atlas team. Atlas (the name is a long story - ask us about it) are responsible for handling the product data we receive, cleaning it up, and making sure it looks nice on Lyst.com. Romain is also helping us to move some of our services onto pypy so they’re fast.

At EuroPython, Romain will be talking about how PyPy fits into the larger programming ecosystem and how it is helping Python keep up with newer languages such as Go, Node.js and Julia. Romain will give some insight into the future of Python and some great PyPy libraries that will fit into it.

Maciej Kula

Maciej is a data scientist at Lyst and works on algorithms and engineering for our recommendation systems, ranging from developing new machine learning models to building large real-time prediction platforms. The data scientists at Lyst do some amazing work with all the data we collect. We have over 14 million products, and Maciej has been building tools that let us accurately and quickly discover the most relevant related products.

Maciej will be talking about approximate nearest neighbours (ANN) search at Europython: how to quickly find the nearest neighbours of a query point in high-dimensional spaces. In his talk, he will explain the algorithm we use for ANN and describe how it has allowed us to build large-scale recommendation and product de-duplication systems at Lyst. Maciej will also discuss some Python packages for performing approximate nearest neighbours searches.

Paul Hallett

I’m a software engineer specialising in HTTP / Web API design and development. I consider myself an API fanatic. I currently work on the Mobile team as their API engineer. I’m building modern API services that allow the mobile team to do everything you can do on the website.

At EuroPython, I’ll be sharing some of the experiences I’ve had taking a very large project and bolting an API on the front of it. In the past I’ve advocated Django and Python as tools for building great API services. Now I want to play my own Devil’s advocate and tell you what it is really like. Essentially, I’ll be talking about what it is really like to build RESTful Web Services with Django.

Where to find us?

We’ll also be accompanied by a bunch more engineers from our team:

Alex Stapleton is our lead backend engineer working on Atlas. Matt Ward, a DevOps engineer, keeps the Lyst platform nice and stable. Miha Zelnik is one of the software engineers working on the Web team, and is also a boardgame master. Rok Carl is part of the team responsible for building our spider infrastructure. Tris, one of our talent specialists, will also be around to offer advice on finding jobs in the tech industry.

We won’t be walking around in the latest Paul Smith or Gucci, but we will be rocking some snazzy Lyst shirts occasionally. Come and have a chat with us or pop along to one of our talks!